Friday, June 09, 2017

Scholarchip IDs: Convenience but at what cost?

I’m grateful to the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools
for keeping tabs on the Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission’s
monthly meeting agendas. They recently alerted me to a resolution about
student ID cards, that in turn started me thinking about ubiquitous
computing, digital classrooms as nodes within Smart Cities, and the role
big data, payment systems, public-private partnerships, and Blockchain
ledger-based finance could play in Ed Reform 2.0.

The SRC passed the Philadelphia School District’s 2017-18 budget last month, and the upcoming meeting on June 15 is packed with resolutions
for new contracted services. Among these is a 5-year, $6.5 million
contract with Scholarchip, the company that manages the district’s
student ID and automated attendance system. Philadelphia is
transitioning to a new student information system, Infinite Campus. A
perfect name for the learning ecosystem age; no need to restrict
learning to schools when the entire city can be your “campus.” One
reason the district gave for deciding to extend Scholarchip’s contract
was their use of smart card technology.

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Scholarchip handles student ID cards for private schools, and their payment gateway system is set up for tuition payment plans.
The learning ecosystem of the future will have different requirements
than the traditional voucher. There will be no up-front, lump-sum
tuition payment, because the plan will be for students to chart their
own educational pathways as they go along, cobbling together a
combination of online and community project-based options. For that
reason the industry needs a mechanism, like a card (or at some point
even a chip in your finger? See Eggers The Circle)
that can handle micropayments to multiple providers. In all likelihood
those money transfers will be linked to meeting academic or
non-cognitive student performance measures through a Blockchain or smart
contract process. I’m sure those pushing ledger-based educational
finance will say that it offers security, transparency and
accountability, but at that point the process of education simply
becomes transactional. Students’ lives are digitally transferred to the
ledger, and the money follows the child and his or her performance in a
very public way.

Even more concerning is the resolution’s off-hand reference to
putting student health conditions onto a smart card, especially given
the push to gather social-emotional data on children through gamified
classroom behavior management apps and surveys.